


Some Shape of Beauty

by lonelywalker



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Gen, post-season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since she was a little girl, Vanessa has always found Malcolm at the heart of a maze.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Shape of Beauty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



_Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / From our dark spirits  
\- John Keats, Endymion_

From the very first, he was the one who brought her Christmas.

The Ives always celebrated, of course, but that was a holiday that focused on hymns and Midnight Mass. The solemnity of the birth of Our Lord was graced with an excellent but sober dinner and visiting relatives. Vanessa, cursed without siblings or cousins, would stay upstairs to read, or scamper away through the gate to the Murray house where, to her great dismay, she’d find a very similar scene. 

“Wait till Father comes back,” Mina told her.

Malcolm was a strange presence among the Murrays and Ives in those early years, a name more than a man. She had met him, of course, but only at the age when she was scared and baffled by adults, when he was just a pair of knees and she was expected to stay out of his way. Mina and Peter spoke of him reverently, like a mystical figure – like Father Christmas, or possibly Our Lord himself – such that Vanessa never truly expected him to appear.

“And Vanessa…”

He knelt down before her, the first time he returned. She was five or six and he was a great big man, with eyes that never flinched away, that never seemed awed or confused by her in the way her own Papa did. Adults weren’t supposed to pay attention to her at all. She thought about curtseying. Instead, they shook hands, hers tiny, his touch light.

“Miss Ives,” he said with a smile. “Are you interested at all in cartography?”

She and Mina sat up on his great desk as everyone gathered around, eager to see where he and his brave companions had been. Peter had explained this to her so many times already, but Vanessa, who had never even been taken to Whitby, found the idea of Africa impenetrable. Malcolm told stories she didn’t understand, full of monsters, rivers, and darkness, but she was enthralled by his voice nonetheless – both as he told them, and then later while they played with Peter’s tiny iron soldiers upstairs, as that same voice told slightly different tales to the adults down below.

Malcolm was a man of action and expensive tastes. Why settle into the dull boredom of everyday life? He had returned home, and home should be at its best when he was there, full of music and merrymaking. For a while, the Murray house was a whirl of colours and cookery, bedecked with garlands of holly and boughs of pine. Vanessa’s mother was delighted, her father impressed beyond envy. Vanessa herself… amid the buzz and bustle, the chatter and laughter, she slipped into the maze.

The maze was Malcolm’s doing too, of course. Grand endeavours were his _raison d’etre_ , and the children could play at being explorers in there while he was gone. But it was a familiar sort of mystery, where even Vanessa had learned all the twists and turns years ago. It was a beautiful thing, full of lush greenery, but no one was ever lost there anymore.

She found him by the statue, smoking a cigar. A mist of rain was falling.

“Miss Ives,” he said, and smiled. “I met a man with seven wives... Do you know that riddle?”

Vanessa nodded. “Kits, cats, sacks and wives.”

“Yes. How many do we carry with us, I wonder?”

She stood and watched him for what seemed like a very long time, the cigar growing shorter, the grass dampening around her feet. And, in the end, he took her hand and led her back to the house, to tea and mince pies.

Christmases like those were few and far between, with Malcolm gone to pursue the Nile once more, or attending to city business from his London townhouse. As Mina grew older, she insisted that they make a real effort to brighten up the heart of the winter with more than church attendance. But none of them could match Malcolm’s exuberance and force of character, nor the sort of desperation that lay behind them.

After the night she went searching in the maze and found him there, not alone, she looked again many times. But Malcolm and the answer to another riddle were nowhere to be found. When Mina’s wedding came, at last, even the maze itself was locked away from her.

“Is it still there, I wonder?” she asked years later, so many years later, as Malcolm replied to his holiday correspondence in flowing black ink. “The maze, or the memory of the maze?”

The streets of London beyond his window were a more curious, treacherous maze to be sure, but there was little magic in them. Or, at least, not the magic she sought. Oh, for enchantment that led to love and laughter, to games and to fears everyone knew would be resolved with a sudden escape into the light.

“As far as I know,” Malcolm said after a pause. Perhaps he regarded her every word as portentous these days. Perhaps he had his own memories to dwell on. “I have a steward caring for the house and grounds. I doubt he would undertake such a radical project without my express permission.”

“Unless it rotted. Rotted and withered.” There were no children now and never would there be until the Murrays and the Ives left forever. There was no romance among the adults, no loves and intrigues and midnight liaisons. Lost innocence only, floating on the breeze.

She turned from the window to find Malcolm watching her. “I can ask,” he said. “If it concerns you.”

They’d begun taking each other seriously ever since the theatre, ever since Mina was lost. He no longer pretended to be engrossed with his work. She no longer pretended he was too arrogant to care.

“No,” she said, although it look her too long to say it. “It makes no difference.”

He smiled a little. “I’ll ask.”

He’d brought her Christmas this year too, melancholy though it had to be, every light and leaf tainted with sorrow. Her prayers were rote, comforting in their familiarity if nothing else. She yearned to slip into darkness, to step outside the door and into a familiar place she could hide and watch and _know_.

She could have gone home, although there was no one waiting to greet her. Her mother dead, her father living with his sister’s family, there would be an empty house haunted by more than she could face. And in the maze... All she’d ever looked for in the maze was already in the room with her now.

“Why did you build it?” she asked. Time seemed to have passed. Papers had moved from Malcolm’s left to his right.

“Many great houses have a maze.” He was frowning over his letter. “A popular pastime. I imagine it was for you children. Or perhaps it was always there. I don’t remember. You would have to ask-”

Whom? The dead?

 _Perhaps it was always there._

Her fingers tapped a rhythm against her skirt. “As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats, each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many were going to St Ives?”

He glanced up, met her eyes, and set down his pen. “Miss Ives... Vanessa.”

So much had waited for her there, so much that still lived within her now: knowledge, lusts, the whispers of a demon. And there was him.

Malcolm stood and pushed back his chair, checking his cuffs for ink stains. “Only I was ever going to St Ives, of course, alone and unburdened.”

“But how many do we carry with us, I wonder?” 

What had he been running from, that first time in the maze? What had he sought to escape among leafy barriers? Shadows from Africa? Familial chains?

“If we carry anything,” he said, “we do so together.”

The streets were cold but not wet, the air clear as they walked in the dusk. Even if she closed her eyes, she knew every turn, but there was no centre here and no freedom, only a maze that went on and on, one they took with them wherever they went.


End file.
